Tuesday, March 31, 2009

A ramble

A friend gave me a copy of Eat, Pray, Love and I thought I'd give it a shot. Gilbert has a nice witty writing style, but I kept thinking, "This woman is infantile, self-centered and nuts!"

Then I realized that during the time she's writing about, she is exactly the age I was when I was infantile, self-centered and nuts. 34. The early part of such a journey will, has to, seem that way. When you start with practically no inner life, you can easily strike out at your outer life, get selfish, hurt people. What's good about her story is not her initial lunacy, but her decision not to get stuck there. Progress is what matters, and progress takes al-o-o-o-ng blasted time.

This photo is from around March 1988. I'm 34 years old, about 3 months sober, and have that new-to-the-program stare: "How did I get here? What in the world do I do now?"

At the time I thought (oh so wrongly!) that nothing had changed. Relationships were an emotional puzzlement. My need to feel capable and confident was still unfulfilled but I no longer even believed that substances could meet that need.

In 1988 I am in emotional kindergarten and I want to be Graduated and have a new life right now.

I went to meetings and looked around me. One who really seemed to have her act together was "Meg."

I've been thinking about her lately. "Meg" and "Jim" were relative newlyweds in their late 30's. Each had 3 kids from failed former marriages. They got into the program, found each other, and formed a family. They had a baby, and I confess I watched the progression of her pregnancy with a mixture of envy and horror. Seven children! She joked about her lousy childhood and how The Sound of Music had been her unattainable fantasy of home and family, and now here she was, probably trying to act out the film. They had a lovely sunny house and the cutest von Trapp Family-style Christmas card you ever saw, and she still had emotional problems. But she went to meetings and talked about them and faced them. She acknowledged her need for real therapy, and found a shrink with strong medical credentials. That's what you do. Pretend everything's hunky-dory, quit your support network, and that's when you get into trouble. She seemed to be doing it right.

I went to lunch with her one day, and unloaded about my then-boyfriend. "He is cute, isn't he?" she said to me with a wry grin, and I found myself reading this statement as a smart assessment that I needed to put my brain in charge and judge whether it really could become what I was looking for.

This might have been her meaning, or it very well might have been early stirrings of my own mind coming back to life. Maybe both. Meg's life deteriorated later, but if I've learned anything, I've learned that that in no way means she lacked smarts and insight. We're a patchwork of sanity and craziness, all of us who are getting our marbles back.

If my own smarts and good judgment were indeed stirring to life, the stirrings were very early because I put a lot more years into trying to hammer bad fits -- friends, lovers, career -- into what I wanted them to be. There are still days when a nice toxic dose of regret will reactivate in my mind, like a mental malaria, but with decreasing frequency. Other days, I breathe deeply and tell myself that I took the time I needed to take in order to learn what I absolutely had to learn.

The photo is a moment in time. A few years later things were radically different. I was getting my marbles back. Meg began to have dissociative episodes, a schizophrenia-like hallucinatory illness, or some deeply buried memories of some serious childhood trauma. She disappeared from the group and rumors were vague as to diagnosis or prognosis. She and Jim split and she was at one point found wandering the streets hundreds of miles away. But no moment-in-time situation is the end of the story. My last news of her is at least 16 years old. It may sound batty to hope that she's found her way back to herself and to a happy life but I have, honest-to-God, seen it happen, and several times. I know people who have overcome wreckage the likes of which I've never had to crawl out of. It's a matter of willingness to take time, time, time to grow up, and not feel too lousy about starting so blasted late.

Meanwhile, back at the book, I keep thinking of an earlier book of poetry, by a poet I've written about before. Like Gilbert's book, it's about both travel and an inner journey, about food and beauty and inner longing and a joyous embrace of life, and it seems better centred and less immature. Gilbert is OK, she has something to say, but I think Miller did it a little better.

2 comments:

I was divorced at 34 and there were times I'd run into a 20-something and say, "I wish I were X-years younger!" That persisted until I was in my early 40s. After that, I found myself running into inappropriately younger women and saying, "I wish she were X-years older."

In matters of life and the heart, that expression "if I knew then what I know now" only works if you don't know much now. I behaved, for the most part, with honor in my youth, but only within a young man's understanding of the term. Much of what I did, much of what I believed, much of what I expected from life, would not fit into the person I am now. I wouldn't mind having some of the energy back, but you can keep the rest of it.

As for the people, some have mellowed, some have crashed and burned, some have simply wandered off. Most are best kept preserved in amber, as memories of a time I don't regret, but don't want back, either. (If you like where you're at, you ought not to despise the road that brought you there.)

From Ruth: There are still days when a nice toxic dose of regret will reactivate in my mind, like a mental malaria, but with decreasing frequency. Other days, I breathe deeply and tell myself that I took the time I needed to take in order to learn what I absolutely had to learn.

From Mike: If you like where you're at, you ought not to despise the road that brought you there.

Oh, now I get to see this. Where were you guys for the 30 or so years when I really could have used it?